Any advice for a fairly experienced Daz Studio user trying out Poser 9 for the first time?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who picked up Poser 9 in the recent $65 promo; that coinciding with the release of the Genesis to Poser .CR2 tutorial/utility just seemed like perfect timing.

Anyway, I'm really having trouble getting to grips with it. The layout's very different and I'm having a hard time finding where everything is; something that'd take me a couple of minutes in DS results in 20 minutes of poking around confused. I don't know how different P9 is from previous versions, but if anyone could point me to some suitable tutorials or something, that'd be really great. It's frustrating because I understand the concepts and all, from having used DS fairly intensively for a year or so, but it's actually putting those into action in P9 that's the hard part. A heads-up on any important technical differences between DS and Poser would be helpful too; I don't want to end up getting the hang of the workflow only to find, say, that lights behave differently and I have to figure that out over again.

I appreciate that this may not be the ideal forum to ask, but I will be using a lot of Daz content, and I figured there should be folks here that use both programs :)

Comments

But in the end, the lack of multicore support killed it for me. :( Having a free 3D app that uses all my cores, and has Genesis (and Reality)...I couldn't pull the trigger on a Poser buy at that point.

I do have Poser 8, and I know it works to point it at the same content library as D|S uses. The key is the tabs, in mine they're over on the right, are where all the content lives. Figures are characters and objects, Poses includes materials... If you've used the Content Library tab in D|S and had to look through your Poser content tree, I think that correlates well with the UI elements in Poser. That said, again, that's based on using Poser 8 briefly recently. I was able to find everything, and since I have V4.2 from a free bundle, I was even able to try and put something together with it. It's not a bad program, but being only able to use multicore if you spring for the super-expensive version kills it for me.

Oh, and Poser has dynamic hair and cloth, which lets it drape on stuff. That's a nice feature.

I am a little confused with the complaints about poser and multi-core usage.
I have Poser 7, Poser 8, and PP2012 and all can use all available cores (+hyper-threading if available) for rendering.
Some functions in the earlier versions do not support multi core usage, but P9 does for most functions.

Strangeloup, below are some links to Poser tutorial collections which you may find useful. At RuntimeDNA, they also have a forum dedicated solely to Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012 in which can be found some useful information.

The Poser manual which comes with the program does have a good introductory section too.

Poser is quite different to DazStudio but they are both wonderful programs. Have fun. :coolsmile:

A heads-up on any important technical differences between DS and Poser would be helpful too

The main two differences that you will come up against straight away are that lights and materials/MATs are different between the two programs.
A LOT of vendors do MATs for both so it might just be a case of installing the PZ2 MAT files and maapping your DAZ runtime to Poser. Set search to deep and it should find and use the same textures.
As a Poser user this is the process I do when I try out DS but in reverse.

Lights just won't cross over I'm afraid (nor cameras for that matter).